(no subject)

Conflux is all gone! I want to sit in a corner and go Waaaaah!

Because of the banquet and cookbook I was much photographed this weekend, which was a bit strange. It still is, because I keep seeing those photographs appear and look at them and think "I look an interesting colour." Breathing is very important if one wants pink cheeks, it appears. The good news is that in a few days I will look 15 years younger and a lot more rosy than I do right now. I know this for a fact because (when Dev and Emma - who are explemplary and patient houseguests) go tomorrow, I shall spend most of the rest of the day in bed. Also, possibly, most of Thursday. (It's very odd seeing what I looked like all weekend - it does, however, make sense of why everyone was so very gentle with me.)

I have fallen in love with the Australian spec fic community all over again. Nick Stathopoulos pointed out when he turned fifty that we are an extended family and he's so very right. A family full of wit and sagacity and love and overwork and books and art.

I was not at my best on panels, and, Mary, I'm so sorry - I read your extract with but half a voice (dratted breathing again). I shall do another reading, sometime, so that people can get the full glory of your writing. And the Tree had an infestation of beetles and bees and bugs and people who bought books had to carry them away...

When I couldn't stay out in the cold the night before last I absconded with a couple of friends and we came back to my place and ate lamb rogan josh and leftover cake from the banquet and we watched the new dinosaur TV series. We had a lot of fun but we will not - not any of us - bother to watch any more episodes. Although if Marilyn were round, I would be wiling to try it just to help her cheer on the dinosaurs.

If you think this post is scatty, that's because it is. I have so much to think and say and can't do it at all well. I also have so much work to do and just want to go down the Coast and get well. The Coast will happen, but not until I get a break in teaching. I'm not teaching this week, but I have Yom Kippur...

I will tell you how awesome Karen Herkes is, and then I'll do a separate post for the other thing I want to say, so that no-one misses it. That will make up for me being scatty? And if anyone who went to the banquet is after the recipe for the goulash, well, it's in the cookbook, along with the recipes for every single one of those amazing cakes. And it's a mystery to me why anyone's asking. Unless it's because they love saying 'goulash' and rolling their eyes and looking at me quite hungrily. I tested lots of recipes, and I already knew this was the best. I've had over two dozen people tell me so, though. I need a tee-shirt saying "I'm always right - accept it and we can move on."

Anyhow, as I was saying, Karen Herkes is utterly, utterly, utterly awesome. Conflux felt warm and friendly and as if we were a group of a half dozen best friends, spending much time together, happily. There were 86 people at the banquet, and quite a few more elsewhere at the convention, and yet it felt intimate and merry and purely joyous. This is something that only a very, very good chair can achieve, and this is why Karen Herkes is utterly, utterly, utterly awesome. if I could enjoy it is my somewhat less-than-well state, it just means that awesomeness is in spades.

Conflux Cookbook

When I wrote the Medieval chapter of the cookbook, I didn't have the notes I had for the other chapters and I knew that Big Things had been forgotten. I just didn't know what those Big Things were. If there had been more time, I could have sent a draft round and seen if other people could remember, but we had very tight schedules and this was not possible. My memory was prompted after the book came out and I want to share a memory with all of you and I want to apologise. This is the Biggest Thing of All that should never have been forgotten!

While Trevor Stafford was the Conflux chair for the first banquet, and while Tansy Rayner Roberts was MC on the night, and while I did the banquet menu and etc, and while Cary and his SCA friends handled entertainment, there was someone who put a vast amount of work in to make it happen. She ordered the most amazing cake I have ever seen in my life, to serve as a subtley (an edible castle!) and she pulled all us odd strands together and she watched over it all. That first feast worked so amazingly because of all that work she put in..

Kaaron Warren's work was the reason that first banquet was so very splendid and it set the tone for all the others.

I made the mistake of trusting notes for the cookbook. In most cases, this was no error - my memory is shocking. In this case, though, there were no notes, and so I would appreciate it if readers would kindly annotate that chapter to make the Medieval feast the way it actually happened, and not the way I remembered it last summer.

"Isn't something missing?" Sharyn asked me, when she edited that chapter.

"Yes," I said, entirely bemused. "I know there are totally key elements and I can't think of them and it's driving me crazy. That story's only half being told and it's all kinds of wrong."

And I kept adding things to the chapter, hoping they were what was missing, but they never were, because what was missing was Kaaron. The cookbook is a much lesser beast without her part of the story being told. In fact, the reason she was asked to contribute a short story was because she was so important (all the short story writers were crucial to the banquets in one way or another). When I was thinking about *that* element, I remembered her work - just not when I wrote the b* chapter.

if anyone needs pens to annotate that chapter, just ask...

(no subject)

Conflux cookbook order form - by popular request (and thanks to Stuart Herring): http://conflux.org.au/conflux_cookbook_order_form.pdf